If you have not read Thomas de Zengotita’s essay “The Romance of Empire” in the July issue of Harper’s, check it out. Truly subversive. (Sorry, not available online.) Also great articles by Paul William Roberts and Peter (The Good) Hitchens– enough to get you kicked out of the bookstore if you try to “visually shoplift” it all in one sitting.

Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator who repressed, murdered and tortured his own people. That and that alone was a good enough reason enough to go to war, according to Bush and his cabal of neoconservatives.

But that’s only true if Iraq proved to be an “imminent” threat. As the old saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Bush may have meant well, but he lied and lied and lied.

The growing tendency of so much of the “news” – especially international reporting – to be pure fiction designed to arouse emotions rather than impart information, is a development that may not be recent, but certainly it has gotten more brazen. I don’t know whether that represents a growing carelessness on the part of the War Party, or else an assumption that their readers have been so dumbed down that it hardly matters.

“Restoring a balanced budget is an important priority for this administration,” White House budget director Joshua Bolten told reporters. “But a balanced budget is not a higher priority than winning the global war on terror, protecting the American homeland, or restoring economic growth and job creation.”

One thing is certain: those who worked and voted for less government, the very foot soldiers in the conservative revolution, have been deceived. Today, the ideal of limited government has been abandoned by the GOP, and real conservatives find their views no longer matter.